devices have become more powerful and more useful, they’ve also
become less expensive and more
accessible.
In this special report, eWEEK
Labs has put together a list of the
25 most significant technologies
and products of the last decade—
things that changed the way we
work, play and live. Some of these
products and technologies set the
stage for the cutting-edge tech we
use today, while others are the cutting-edge tech we use today.
1. 3G broadband
Sure, it’s not as good as it
could be. And the competing mix
of standards (UMTS/EVDO) creates compatibility problems. But
it wasn’t that long ago that one
could get Internet access only by
finding a Wi-Fi hot spot or plugging in an Ethernet cable. With
3G broadband, smartphones, netbooks, laptops and even mobile
offices can get pretty good Internet
access pretty much anywhere.
2. 802.11g
The first generation of wire-
less networking technologies were
cool. And if you were just access-
ing Internet content, they seemed
plenty fast. But you could forget
about sending large files to other
systems on the same wireless
network. 802.11g made wireless
usable for most networking tasks
and helped boost the spread of
Wi-Fi to offices, homes, parks and
hotels around the world.
3. AJAX
It seemed simple at first—just a
set of scripts and standards technologies that were already around
for building Web apps. But the
mix of technologies that make
up AJAX launched a Web revolution, making it possible to build
attractive and interactive Web-based GUIs that didn’t require
extra plug-ins or extensions and
that worked well in most modern
Web browsers.
4. Amazon EC2
Probably the first real iteration
of a cloud-computing platform,
Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud
is still one of the most popular.
Making it simple for anyone to
throw a virtual server machine
onto Amazon’s powerful server
platform, EC2 changed what it
meant to own a server or even run
a business: A large number of new
businesses don’t even own server
hardware—their entire operations
run on EC2.
5. AMD64
At the beginning of the decade,
general-purpose 64-bit computing
wasn’t looking promising. Intel’s
Itanium architecture was proving
difficult to implement and was
generally seen as a disappointment. Instead of taking Intel’s
rewrite approach, AMD built its
64-bit platform on existing processor technology—and pushed
64-bit processors into the mainstream.
6. BlackBerry
You have to admit that if a product gets compared with a highly
addictive drug, it must be a huge
success. The CrackBerry, er, BlackBerry quickly became a must-have
mobile device, and it’s still pretty
much the mobile device of choice
for business users. By making it
easy to stay connected anywhere,
25 TECHNOLOGIES FROM PAGE 18
AJAX launched a Web revolution.
Amazon EC2 changed what it meant to run
a server.
AMD smartly built its AMD64 on existing
technology.
3G provides Internet pretty much anywhere.
There had been Wi-Fi before it, but
802.11g made wireless usable.
